You want to make
sure you graduate college as an independent thinker. If your college education
gives you nothing else, it should give you that, or it's no more than a trade
school.

You want to make
sure you are not dependent on others to tell you what to think

You're not a
child; your parents don't make your decisions for you anymore. You decide
many things for yourself. Your parents may help you-if you're lucky-but they
don't make your important decisions for you anymore. Though you may respect
one another, and I hope you do, their values may differ from yours.

You're not
an adolescent; you don't have to have the same opinions as your peers, though
you may sometimes. But you don't have to. You've grown beyond peer pressure.

AND now you're
a young adult, not a kid or a piece of clay to be shaped and molded; you're
more than an inert sponge soaking up the opinions of your textbooks and your
professors-ideally, they are there to give you the tools to help you build
your own opinions, not to indoctrinate you to any particular mode of thinking.

Most of all,
you are not dependent on the government or the mass media to tell you what
to think, though they are trying very hard to tell you what to think day and
night, night and day. But you have learned, I hope, to form your own opinions,
make your own sound judgments.

When you join the
public conversation as a critical thinker, an independent thinker, you join
it in your OWN voice, not the parroted voice of others. When you are confident
about doing that, you'll know you got your money's worth from your college education.

In practice, this
independent thinking looks like critical thinking, which we can define as a
certain set of skills: RESPONDING, QUESTIONING, ANALYZING, INTERPRETING, SYNTHESIZING,
AND EVALUATING. Each of these requires active engagement, active thinkingno
time for being passive, no time for sitting back and sponging things up.